Read Myths and Legends of the Celts (Penguin Reference) Online
Authors: James MacKillop
Myths and Legends of the Celts (Penguin Reference) (39 page)
The furthest flung, newest and least studied canton of the Celtic world lies in the Canadian Maritime province of Nova Scotia. Large numbers of impoverished, landless Gaelic-speaking Highlanders were settled there from the late eighteenth century through to the middle of the nineteenth. They came from the former shires of Inverness, Argyll and Ross, both the mainland and the Hebridean Islands. Some were victims of the Clearances. Whereas Irish, Welsh and Scottish Gaelic were once spoken, written and published elsewhere in North America, only in Nova Scotia did a widespread oral tradition flourish, one that has persisted until the twenty-first century. The 1900 census recorded 100,000 speakers, most of them born in the province. This
Gàidhealtachd
[Gaelic-speaking region] encompassed most of Cape Breton Island and the mainland counties south of the Cumberland Strait.
Given the relative poverty of Gaelic-speakers in the hinterlands of a remote province, traditions there were little heeded by the majority culture. Official disdain helped suppress the language until the late twentieth century when most native speakers had died off. Conventional observation held that Cape Bretoners, or ‘Capers’, had scant literature meriting much attention. Recent study corrects this misapprehension. Margaret MacDonell’s
The Emigrant Experience: Songs of Highland Emigrants in North America
(1982) shows how a highly sophisticated, disciplined Gaelic literary culture extended uninterrupted from Scotland to Nova Scotia and smaller settlements in Ontario and North Carolina. Despite the emphasis on adapting to a new environment, the texts MacDonell examines include continuing references to Scottish experience and place-names, such as Strathglass, Gairloch and Islay. Their isolation and linguistic separateness foster a striking cultural conservatism in Nova Scotian Highland settlers.
The ambience of the Scottish homeland is more evident among the tales of unlettered Gaelic speakers, with references to kings and castles
never seen in the New World. Adventures of Irish heroes such as Cúchulainn, Fionn mac Cumhaill, Oscar and Diarmait (also known in Gaelic Scotland) are extended in a land of herring fisheries and maple trees. Some of the traditions that migrated to Nova Scotia, however, are not recorded in Scotland. Their existence supports the documentable pattern that archaic survivals are found at the periphery of a given cultural area. Most of the Highlanders in Nova Scotia emigrated before folklore and folktales were thought worth recording.
Recording of Gaelic lore in Nova Scotia did not begin until the twentieth century, and the storyteller with the most extensive repertory, Joe Neil MacNeil (1908–97), was not interviewed until the 1970s. The Harvard-trained scholar John Shaw transcribed, edited and translated his stories in
Tales Until Dawn
(1987) when MacNeil was in advanced years. A fragment not included in the collection gives what is possibly the only item of cosmology from the Celtic world. In it the origin of the Milky Way galaxy is depicted as emerging from two trees separated by a loch, as if to complete an arch between them. The narrator places this episode within the well-known Ulster story of Deirdre, here spelled ‘Deirdire’. Her lover here is named Nois [Noise], one of the ‘Children of Uisneach’ [Uisnech]. In this variant the sons of Uisneach are killed in a great, unnamed battle, after which Deirdire falls into the grave with the men. The bodies of the two lovers are exhumed and reburied on either side of the burial mound. Soon a tree grows from each grave and rises until the two join. This arouses a great deal of vengeful malice in an unnamed king, who orders that the trees be cut down. Soon another pair of trees grows and joins until the king has them cut down as well. This sequence of events recurs repeatedly until the king decides to have the bodies placed on either side of a loch, a distance too great for the trees to span. Between the trees a cluster of stars gathers in a light trail,
Sgrìob Chlann Uisnich
[track of the Children of Uisneach]. Shaw reports having also heard this phrase elsewhere in Gaelic Nova Scotia.
Elements in the three-word Gaelic phrase invite speculative interpretation. Uisnech, along with its associations in the patrimony of Noise and his brothers, is also a prominent hill in Co. Westmeath, an omphalos of pre-Christian Ireland. The druid Mide lit the first fire in Ireland there.
A widely known folktale has it that Fionn mac Cumhaill once tore a huge sod of earth from the province of Ulster, thus creating Lough Neagh, and hurled it into the Irish Sea where the sod became the Isle of Man. Thirty-two miles off the coast of Ireland, the Isle of Man has closer cultural ties to Leinster than to nearby Ulster. Further, the island tends to be rocky, not sandy like the shores of Lough Neagh. Metaphorically, however, the story has something useful to impart. The Isle of Man is not the discrete cultural entity that its quasi-independence would imply. It is a 220-square-mile Crown Dependency of the United Kingdom with its own parliament, the Tynwald, and its own banking laws. Until 1974, when the last native speaker died, it had its own language called Manx or Manks. Ancient monuments, such as neolithic chambered tombs and Bronze Age cairns and ringforts, correlate with Irish design. The earliest people of the Isle of Man came from both Britain and Ireland; later there was extensive Norse settlement. For a while in the Middle Ages, the Norse rulers of Man extended their power into the Hebrides in the west of Gaelic Scotland. The Manx language unmistakably derives from Old Irish but has more in common with Scottish Gaelic than with Modern Irish. Its real distinction lies in its being written in English phonetics. The Irish hero Fionn mac Cumhaill, for example, becomes Finn McCooil on Man, while his son Oisín is Oshin. In the Manx language, the Isle of Man is known as
Mannin
or
Ellan Vannin
.
Known to the ancient geographer Ptolemy (second century
AD
) as Manavia, and to the Romans as Mona, the Isle of Man has a peripheral presence in many early Irish narratives. The sea god Manannán mac Lir takes his name from the Isle of Man, rather than the other way round, as was once thought. Manannán’s realm, Emain Ablach, which has no specific place on the map, is sometimes confused with Man. The otherworldly realm of Dún Scáith and the shaggy-haired warriors known as the Fir Fálgae are speciously associated with the Isle of Man. Absent from the Isle, however, was a native tradition of learning, ecclesiastical or secular, to record Man’s traditions in medieval times. Manx was not a written language until the translation of
The Book
of Common Prayer
(
c
.1625). After some isolated references in the eighteenth century, disciplined collection of Manx lore did not begin until after the middle of the nineteenth century with William Harrison’s
Mona Miscellany
(1869), Edward Callow’s
The Phynodderree
(1882) and Arthur Moore’s
FolkLore of the Isle of Man
(1891).
The most distinctive figure in Manx oral tradition, and virtually the only one with any currency in the wider English-speaking world, is the solitary fairy known as the fenodyree or phynodderree. The name, never capitalized, may be spelled in nine or ten different ways, testimony to the figure’s persistence in the popular mind and his reappearance before different collectors over time. He is an individual rather than a class, and is often portrayed naked but covered with body hair. In most of European lore, the solitary fairy, as opposed to the trooping fairy, is usually ominous and malignant. Not so this Manx figure. The fenodyree, like the Scottish brownie, can be helpful by performing tasks requiring formidable strength and endurance, such as carrying a huge block of marble a long distance or harvesting an entire field of crops. Admired for this second generous task, he may be known by the complimentary epithet
yn foldyr gastey
[the nimble mower]. At some earlier point he bore the name
uddereek
, suggestive of handsomeness, but he was transformed into his familiar but ugly persona for courting a mortal girl from Glen Alden. The fenodyree’s hairy legs suggest to some commentators a parallel with the satyr of classical tradition, but he lacks the requisite sexual aggression. Sometimes the fenodyree is ascribed a wife, with whom he often quarrels. Sometimes he is capable of mischief. When one imprudent man invokes the fenodyree to cure his little red cow he is disappointed with the results. Indeed, the fenodyree can summon powers to heal the little animal, but he also carries it off in the end.
Occupying a long narrow peninsula in southwestern Britain, Cornwall suffers from being thought of as a tourist destination. W. S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan set their
Pirates of Penzance
(1879) in the Cornish resort town to imply what a familiar and domesticated place
it had become. The extinction of the Cornish language in the eighteenth century has diminished a sense of separateness from the rest of England. The modern county, coextensive with the former duchy of Cornwall, is known in the Cornish language as
Kernow
. Still known from many documents, as well as from contemporary attempts to ‘revive’ it, Cornish is a Brythonic cousin of Welsh and Breton. As with Scottish Gaelic and Manx, Cornish lacked a learned tradition in medieval times, although the area had been evangelized by Irish monks beginning in the sixth century. Many Arthurian legends are set in Cornwall, notably the story of Tristan, Iseult and King Mark, and some of them take Cornish form. The best known word from the language is ‘Jennifer’, the Cornish form of ‘Guinevere’ or the Welsh ‘Gwenhwyfar’ [white, smooth], once a characteristic woman’s name there. The Gospels began to be translated in the tenth century, and the Cornish mystery plays of the fifteenth century are much admired as supreme examples of late medieval drama. Despite some odd snatches in Edward Lhuyd’s
Archaeologia Britannica
(1707), collections of Cornish oral tradition did not appear until a century after the death of the language when stories were known only in English form. These collections were by Robert Hunt,
Popular Romances of the West of England
(1865) and William Bottrell,
Traditions and Hearthside Stories of West Cornwall
(1870).
The most resilient figure from Cornish oral tradition to have made its way into English discourse is the pixie, an adaptation of the earlier piskie. The more historical spelling ‘piskie’ has been so displaced by the more familiar ‘pixie’ that it is no longer recognizable to most readers, but somewhat different phenomena are denoted by the different forms. In the collections of Hunt and Bottrell, the piskie (also pigsie) is a wizened-looking, weird old man who threshes grain. He may mislead folks through a ‘piskie-ride’ on horseback. The term ‘pixie’ was known in English at least sixty years before Hunt and Bottrell and derives from traditions in Somerset and Devon as well as Cornwall, perhaps carried to neighbouring counties by Cornish migrants. These pixies, even when they rise to mortal size, have definable characteristics: they are red-headed, with pointed ears, turned-up noses and short faces. They are usually seen naked, are known to squint, and like to steal horses at night. Like other figures in English
oral tradition, Puck or Robin Goodfellow, they are fond of giving wrong directions or misleading travellers. This association gives us the still useful English word ‘pixilated’, adapted from ‘pixie-led’.
While most Cornish stories are episodic or extended anecdotes, the one known as ‘The Giants of Morvah’ may once have stretched to epic length. Nineteenth-century storytellers report that its many complex details and turns of plot required three nights to recite, but only a précis has been recorded. Morvah of the title is one of Cornwall’s most significant archaeological sites on the windswept northern slopes of the Land’s End promontory, four miles northeast of the town of St Just, in the far west of the county. Standing stones at Morvah include the granite
Men-an-Tol
[holed stone], a spectacular annular or doughnut-shaped megalith once thought to have curative properties. It is an area where Cornish language and folk customs survived until the latest date. Morvah was also the scene of an annual fair on the first Sunday in August, a counterpart to Lughnasa celebrations in Ireland. ‘The Giants of Morvah’ was recited at the fair. Teasingly, the story contains elements suggesting a possible link to the Irish hero Lug Lámfhota, whose worship lies at the root of Lughnasa.
There are four giants in the story, Tom the protagonist, Jack his visitor and later friend, and two who are unnamed. One summer’s night when Tom is driving his wagon home, he finds his way blocked by a huge stone and so takes a short-cut across what he thinks is common land. It is not. The resident giant challenges him for trespassing and uproots an elm tree with which to beat Tom. Without losing his composure, Tom overturns his wagon, removing the axle and wheel to use as weapons against the giant. The ground shakes with their blows, but just as exhaustion is about to overtake Tom, he triumphs. He hears people dancing around festive fires but knows he must bury the giant and take possession of his castle and land. A woman named Joan whom Tom had known bathes his wounds, and together they take possession of the castle, which brims with jewels and golden treasure. They live together happily for many years and produce several children of which the oldest is a beautiful daughter named Genevra (variant of Jennifer, Guinevere, etc.). Like the giant before him, Tom tries to keep the curious away from his treasures.
The serenity of Tom and his happy family does not last. One morning
another giant smashes through the front gate with a hammer in his hand. It is Jack the tinkard, with a toolbag on his back. Tin had long been mined in Cornwall, and a handler of tin, a tinker or ‘tinkard’, does not carry the questionable status that calling bears in Ireland. Impatient that Tom’s desire for safety has blocked the road to St Ives, Jack challenges him to combat in wrestling or by slinging stones. Tom responds with a thrust of his axle wheel, but Jack wields his staff so quickly it looks like a spinning wheel. Soon Tom’s weapon is flying over a fence. Rather than gloat at his prowess, Jack offers his friendship and demonstrates that he has many talents, like Lug in his epithet
Samildánach
[many-skilled]. Jack makes a bow from an elm sapling and quickly slays ten animals for Tom and Joan’s larder.
Shown the treasures in Tom’s castle, Jack is less impressed with the gold and jewels but more taken with the bits and pieces that he could use in his own work. He uses them to fashion a pearl necklace that he places on Genevra’s head when he takes his place beside her at table. To honour Genevra further, Jack does battle with a second unnamed giant at Morvah. He takes the stone cover off an old mineshaft and his adversary falls down it. Jack thus becomes the possessor of the Morvah giant’s treasures. He weds Genevra during a huge feast on the first Sunday in August. In each successive year the anniversary is celebrated, with Jack teaching friends and relations skills they did not know existed. In time the commemoration grows to such an extent that it seems more like a fair, Morvah Fair, than a wedding anniversary.